Celebrating people who bring the Internet to life

Blog Posts for 2015

Doug Engelbart will be long and justifiably remembered as the inventor of the computer mouse, as a pioneer in the development of hypertext and for the December 9, 1968 "Mother of All Demos," the first exhibition of integrated point-and-click, windows, hypertext, hyperlinking, word processing display editing and collaborative computing nearly three decades before such cyber-environments became the norm.

But, though he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame last year, Dr. Engelbart's greatest contribution to society may not have been technological. The Internet pioneer's greatest breakthrough may be to change how we think, how we learn and innovate, and how we collaborate.

Dr. Engelbart's ideas have proved an inspiration to a wide swath of admirers and acolytes including his daughter, Christina, an assiduous guardian of her father's legacy who runs the Doug Engelbart Institute.

Then there's Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Siri (yes, that Siri) and founding member of Change.org, and...

On December 9, 1968, Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute held a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. Retrospectively called ‘The Mother of All Demos,’ this marked the first time the world saw a computer mouse, hypertext linking, real-time text editing, multiple windows with flexible view control and shared-screen teleconferencing. This is a highlight of this demonstration, in which Dr. Engelbart shares these personal computing capabilities, and helps set the course for technology history:

Here is a quick snapshot of how the news media worldwide covered some of our Internet Hall of Fame inductees in April.

The Boston Globe ran a 25-year look-back on the Internet, interviewing four of our great Hall of Famers: Nii Quaynor, Robert Melcalfe, Dave Farber and Richard Stallman. Here’s what they had to say.

Vint Cerf talked about what he’s thinking the Internet will look like in the future. As always, he’s thinking about some amazing things.

Brewster Kahle was in the East Bay Express (of Berkeley, Calif.), for offering hundreds of thousands of books from his Internet Archive (of which the Archive has multiple copies) to be given away to attendees at this June’s East Bay Book Festival. The Festival director of course said yes … and the result will be a library made out of books.

We’re proud of Peter Kirstein, who was chosen to receive the prestigious Marconi Award.

NewYorker.com recently published an interview with Internet Hall of Famer Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine. New Yorker's Nick Thompson discusses that interview and tells the hosts of "CBS This Morning: Saturday" that Kahle's work matters because "the Internet is constantly dying and being reborn."